Wow. It’s been a LONG TIME since I made my last post here on Blogger... the last time I posted, the 9.0 earthquake-tsunami devastated Japan; India won the cricket World Cup; Jason Garrett was a rookie head coach for the Cowboys and Derrick Rose was the NBA MVP and Dirk Nowitzki won his only title by the end of the 2010-2011 season.
Well, the reason I am posting now is that I have just discovered the power of a new computer program - Tableau. It’s a data visualization software for desktops, to put it bluntly. Data is so boring to stare at, and I am not much of a stat guy... and that’s where Tableau comes into play. You can take various forms of data - from Excel files to Amazon/Google/Oracle cloud databases - and import them to Tableau; from there, you can just simply drag-and-drop various variables to create wonderful visual representations.
Which brings me to tonight. I have been taking a Tableau class at my local community college for about a month now, and it wraps-up this Saturday morning. I decided to create three dashboards, each showing the Top 100 NFL players of 2017 (last year’s data) from three different data sources; the first/main one depicts the data as an average from:
The NFL players (what was on TV over the summer last year)
Pro Football Focus (PFF - a statistics-based sports business)
The social media forum Reddit (in which I was among 50 or so users that gave our rankings)
The second dashboard shows just the ESPN data, while the third dashboard shows the Reddit data. Each dashboard has the players sorted by team (and division) on the leftmost bar chart; how they are grouped nationally on a contiguous US map on the right; and on the bottom, by position, with the names and rankings on the bottom-rightmost table.
The great part about Tableau is that you can toggle among the various features. The dropdown on the absolute bottom-left corner allows you to sort by team; the radio buttons on the top-right sort by playoff/non-playoff teams; and clicking on any of the individual bars or pie chart (on the map) will sort by team; you can also click on the ESPN/NFL logo/Reddit snoo logos to go to the other two databases.
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